Increasingly Diverse School System Could Use Multilingual Specialist

Palm Beach County's school population has grown increasingly more diverse during the 1990s, but the district's ability to communicate with all its students and parents has not kept pace.

That situation should change for the better soon if the School Board approves a proposal to hire a multilingual public-affairs specialist to the staff of the district's Business and Community Alliances Department.

The prospective linguist would facilitate communication with non-English-speaking parents and business owners, representatives of Spanish and Creole newspapers, radio stations and other media.

At present, Palm Beach County has a multicultural department that translates documents and provides translation services to anyone needing them in order to do business with the school district.

But the new language specialist _ presumably a person fluent in Spanish and Creole _ would give the district the ability to communicate directly with speakers of the languages native to the county's two main minority student groups.

Miami-Dade County already employs speakers of foreign languages in its public affairs department while Broward refers all non-English questions to its multicultural department.

With the proportions of Latin American and Haitian students in the school population of more than 140,000 rising annually, Palm Beach County needs to make a more vigorous effort to guarantee that its minority students and their parents are able to participate fully in the educational experience. Adding a multilingual specialist to the district's Business and Community Alliances Department will be a good start.